1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing system, an information processing apparatus, an image processing method and a program.
2. Description of the Related Art
It has become the norm to mount a display screen at which text information, images and the like can be displayed at a terminal device such as a portable music player in recent years. In addition, display screens at which images can be displayed are mounted at terminal devices such as portable telephones and portable music players as well as portable personal computers, PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), digital cameras and portable still image/video viewers. With the technological progress made in recent years, larger display screens with sharply defined still and video images can now be displayed at the display screens of most terminal devices. However, the resolution in the display screen at a terminal device is lower than the resolution of images photographed with a digital still camera or the like. For this reason, the user of the terminal device first reduces the size of an image before transferring it to the terminal device or operate the terminal device so as to display a reduced image.
A method whereby an image reduction rate is set and images are reduced at an uniform rate (relative setting) has been proposed in order to reduce the labor used for image transfer or in the terminal device operation described above. However, since the size of the reduced image is determined in conformance to the size of the original image in this method, the reduced image size may not achieve a suitable fit the size of the display screen.
Another method whereby the user sets the width and height of the reduced image to be used for reduced image display (absolute setting) has been proposed as alternative measures for reducing the labor of the image transfer or the terminal device operation. However, while this method allows the user to set an image size suitable for the resolution of the display screen, there may be images that are not reduced to the suitable size depending upon the shape of the display screen. For instance, when displaying a longitudinally oriented image at a terminal device equipped with a laterally oriented display screen, the height of the image will be reduced in conformance to the height of the display screen. The size of the image thus reduced is bound to be exceedingly small, with large margins (hereafter referred to as black strips or a non-display area) formed to the left and the right of the reduced image displayed at the display screen (see FIG. 13). In other words, the number of effective pixels constituting the reduced image will be much smaller than the number of pixels available at the display screen.
JP 2005-293063 A, for instance, discloses a technology related to the method described above, whereby an image is displayed in an enlargement or in a reduced size at a terminal device so that the entire image is contained within the display screen. When, for instance, an image stored in a terminal device such as a portable telephone is too large to be displayed in full in the display screen, this technology may be adopted to display the image by reducing it to a size small enough to be contained in the display screen.